Colony Beta Overview

The Colony Beta is for teams who want to create their own “Collaboration Network”—a place to work with, incentivize, and track the contributions of a network of collaborators. It combines task management with “payments” and tracking.

This is Colony

However, it’s important to note that the Colony beta represents a limited subset of the eventual functionality.

Our goal is to make organizations more open. To make it easy for people to work, collaborate, and make decisions openly, together. Task management is the bedrock upon which that vision is being built, and we will be continually adding new features and improving existing ones until we get there.

Features like:

Public & private colonies

Automated cryptocurrency payments

$/£/€ payments with Stripe

Integrations with your favourite tools (think: Slack, GitHub, Xero)

A reputation system which quantifies the expertise of your team

A voting system using that reputation to weight decisions

Distributed authority—decisions made by those doing the work

Dispute resolution and arbitration

Notifications to surface information to the right people at the right time

Rich analytics to understand your organization at a glance

Emoji 😉

Our goal is to learn. We want to put something into users’ hands so we can learn as fast as possible about what works, what doesn’t, and what to prioritize next.

To that end, ladies and gentlemen, we give you: Colony β.

Task Management

The Colony Beta has three parts:

Projects

People

Tasks

Projects. You can create an unlimited number of projects to organize work:

People. Invite your collaborators into your Colony and assign roles:

Tasks. Each project is organized using the popular kanban methodology. You can create custom workflows using vertical columns:

Add new columns to create a custom workflow

Prioritize tasks by moving cards up or down within a column, or horizontally from one column to the next.

Move cards from column to column to visualize the status of work

You can add a description, assign tags, and have conversations within the task.

Tasks: Files, Tags, Conversations, Tokens

Incentivize

Our vision of work is one in which a network of contributors can collaborate on projects easily. Incentivizing contributions is key.

Each Colony has their own “token”. A token is a representation of value. Maybe it represents a budget ($, £, €), points (e.g., air miles), project ownership, or something else. You choose what your token represents within your colony.

Generate tokens for your Colony!

You can assign tokens to tasks to incentivize (and track) the contributions of your collaboration network. (The “budget” for a task can be set to zero if necessary.)

“Fund” a task

Once a task has been “funded”, you can assign it to someone in your Colony . This can happen in one of two ways:

Receive work requests from collaborators in your Colony and choose one of the requesters:

Colony member submitting a request to work on a taskAssigning a task to a requester

2. Assign it to anyone in the Colony (as long as they accept!)

Once the assignee has completed the task, they can submit their work for review. If it’s good, you can Accept and Pay for the task.

Accept and pay for work completed

The tokens will be transferred to the assignee and will be tracked on their work profile and the Colony transaction record.

Track

Admins in a Colony can see a transaction record, a list of who’s done what.

Shortly after our initial beta launch, we’ll have records broken down by individuals:

Everyone can see the activity log that will easily keep you up-to-date with ongoing activity within your Colony.

Beta Program

This is the early beta feature set: task management with payments (your own Colony token) and transaction records.

Do you have an organization that is looking to become open externally and collaborate with talent outside of your organization?

If so, we’re still looking for great people to try our first version of the product once it’s built. If being more open externally and building your own collaboration network is something you want for your organization, contact Collin to discuss participating in the Colony beta.

We intend for beta testers to create their own Colony (“Collaboration Network”), invite in their network of contributors, and use Colony to surface and incentivize work, handle “payments”, and track who’s done what.